Measuring Welfare Losses from Hypoxia: The Case of North Carolina Brown Shrimp

Abstract

While environmental stressors such as hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen) are perceived as a threat to the productivity of coastal ecosystems, policy makers have little information about the economic consequences for fisheries. Recent work on hypoxia develops a bioeconomic model to harness microdata and quantify the effects of hypoxia on North Carolina's brown shrimp fishery. This work finds that hypoxia is responsible for a 12.9% decrease in NC brown shrimp catches from 1999-2005 in the Neuse River Estuary and Pamlico Sound, assuming that vessels do not react to changes in abundance. The current article extends this work to explore the full economic consequences of hypoxia on the supply and demand for brown shrimp. Demand analysis reveals that the NC shrimp industry is too small to influence prices, which are driven entirely by imports and other domestic U.S. harvest. Thus, demand is flat and there are no measurable benefits to shrimp consumers from reduced hypoxia. On the supply side, we find that the shrimp fleet responds to variation in price, abundance, and weather. Hence, the supply curve has some elasticity. Producer benefits of reduced hypoxia are less than a quarter of the computed gains from assuming no behavioral adjustment.

Space-Time Geostatistical Assessment of Hypoxia in the Northern Gulf of Mexico

“…Similar to the spatial extent of hypoxia, the thickness of the hypoxic layer is expected to vary over inter- and intra-annual time scales. ,, In addition, the spatially and temporally extensive DO estimates provided here could be leveraged to further elucidate hypoxia effects on nekton, sessile organisms, and fisheries. Studies correlating annual measures of hypoxia severity with metrics of fishery performance have been criticized because they lack statistical power and rarely control for other potentially correlated factors. ,, Recent studies using higher resolution (daily to weekly temporal scales and 1 to 10 km spatial scales) fisheries catch and DO data have detected significant effects of hypoxia on fisheries not evident in annual correlations. ,, …”

Recovery of lakes and coastal marine ecosystems from eutrophication: A global meta‐analysis

“…Similar economic damages from freshwater eutrophication in England and Wales are estimated to cost US$105–160 million annually (Pretty et al ). Lastly, hypoxia was responsible for US$0.25 million in annual welfare losses between 1999 and 2005 in the Neuse River Estuary and Pamlico Sound of North Carolina (Huang et al ).…”

Heat and Hypoxia Exposure Mediates Circadian Rhythms Response via Methylation Modification in Apostichopus japonicas

“…During acclimation and experiment, the remaining feed was removed daily. For the stress conditions, 26 • C was used for heat stress and 2 mg/L DO was used for hypoxia stress, for the fact that the A. japonicus experienced the limits of temperature at 26 • C and 2 mg/L DO in summer in its important local living environment of northern Yellow sea and Bohai sea, as well as the definition of hypoxia by the committee on Environment and Natural Resources at the National Science and Technology Council in 2000 (Huang et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2014;Huo et al, 2019). Then, A. japonicus were divided into four groups.…”